Wicked Muncie

By Keith Roysdon and Douglas Walker

Explore the notorious and unusual side of Muncie's history.

Muncie is the classic small American city. But for much of the past two centuries, the city fell victim to murder, corruption and the bizarre. Mayor Rollin Bunch went to prison for mail fraud, while his police commissioner faced a murder rap. Viola "Babe" Swartz ran a brothel out of a truck stop that was raided by police at least a dozen times but ran for sheriff in the 1974 primary election. June Holland, of the locally famous Holland triplets, killed her neighbor for refusing to sell her house.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781439658338

Keith Roysdon

For most of the past four decades, veteran journalist Douglas Walker has covered the criminal justice system in East Central Indiana for the Star Press and its predecessor, the Muncie Evening Press . He has received dozens of awards for writing, investigative reporting and public service, many the result of collaborations with reporter Keith Roysdon, with whom he also wrote a weekly column on Muncie politics for many years. This marks the duo's fourth book on crime and justice in Muncie and Delaware County. Keith Roysdon is a lifelong Indiana resident who now lives in Tennessee. He has won more than thirty state and national first-place awards for journalism, many for work cowritten by Douglas Walker. Their third book, The Westside Park Murders , was named Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists. Roysdon's crime novel Seven Angels won the 2021 Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Novel from Mystery Writers of America Midwest.

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INTRODUCTION

More than a few midwestern cities claimed the nickname Little Chicago and all that implied: crime, corruption and, at times, a swaggering boastfulness about that reputation.

But Muncie, Indiana, was one of the few towns that truly earned the title.

Since its founding in the late 1820s, Muncie—a little less than an hour northeast of Indianapolis by modern travel methods—has been a city of contradictions. Thousands of people came to Muncie from the south and east, hoping to make their fortunes, or at least a decent living, in the city’s twentieth-century factories. They worked hard and turned the city into a manufacturing powerhouse until the dawn of the twenty-first century, when most of the surviving factories closed.

But many came here for the city’s reputation as a town open to risk-taking and lawbreaking. Gambling, prostitution and liquor—and the people who provided those vices—ruled the less-genteel neighborhoods of Muncie. Occasionally, a crusading newspaper publisher, daredevil cop or by-the-book prosecuting attorney called out lawbreakers or even tried to curb them.

Along with the risk-takers came the harsher elements of society: the thieves and con artists and murderers. Sometimes they were easily recognized by their deeds, and sometimes they were even caught in the act. Sometimes the influential and supposedly respectable turned their hands against their neighbors, believing they were above the law.

Too often, they were right.

Since the early 1900s, Muncie has been considered the typical small American city, thanks to the famous Middletown sociological study. The city has a firm place in pop culture. Talk show host David Letterman graduated from college here, Garfield creator Jim Davis drew his comic here and movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and TV shows like The X-Files set stories here. The list of pop culture references to Muncie is long and amusing.

But Muncie has been anything but typical in the grim and oddball incidents that have marked its history. From public officials who spent time in jail to mysterious murders, from unfortunate encounters that ended in mayhem to offbeat crimes, from notorious madams who ran for public office to a gypsy king buried here, Muncie has long been in the headlines.

As these stories unfolded, some publicity-conscious Muncie officials have had an inclination to suppress what they viewed as negative news. In decades past, however, that mania for secrecy—and willingness to hide the truth—at times reached such a level that decisions were seemingly made to let murders go unsolved and killers go unpunished.

By recounting these stories from the 1890s to the 1970s, Wicked Muncie gives readers a look at the city that many have heard of but few know. Some of the stories are amusing. Some are dark. Some are astounding. Some are heartbreaking.

To read these stories is to know the city: its dim taverns, its dank jail cells and its bright courtrooms, where justice was—sometimes—served.

1

A WIDE-OPEN TOWN

The shootout at Muncie’s New Deal Cigar Store—at 1:20 a.m. on Thursday, October 13, 1949—left two men dead, a third mortally wounded and four others nursing gunshot wounds.

The bullets fired that morning in the 600 block of South Walnut Street, just north of the tracks, also inflicted grievous wounds on Muncie’s image, creating ripples that would damage local reputations and careers.

A resulting eighteen-day murder trial of two southern Indiana men, accused of coming to Muncie to rob participants in a poker game at the New Deal, hung the city’s dirty linen on a public clothesline daily, a local newspaper suggested.

I blame Muncie politicians for the deaths of [the] men in the gambling den, Reverend John C. Roberts of the Muncie Ministerial Association told reporters a day after the shootings. Politicians have let gambling and boozing run wide open in Muncie. They have the blood of these men on their hands. …Muncie is the Midwest Mecca for fugitives from the law.

In the end, local authorities, stinging from widespread criticism, appeared to lose interest in pursuing justice in the New Deal case. An event that sent three men to their graves would result in a single defendant serving five years in prison.

There would be conflicting narratives concerning what exactly unfolded in the cigar store that night before the bullets began to fly.

Bedford residents Donald Franklin Dalton, twenty-six, and George Edward Gratzer, twenty-seven, said they came to Muncie on October 12 looking for a card game. Finding one, evidence suggests, likely wasn’t much of a challenge.

The bloodstained back room of the New Deal Cigar Store on South Walnut Street in Muncie, where three men were fatally shot on October 13, 1949. Courtesy of the Muncie Star.

Prosecutors would contend that the out-of-towners walked into the New Deal intending to commit armed robbery.

The manager of the cigar store, Ralph Frazier, told police that about ten men were playing poker when he noticed a stranger—later identified as Gratzer—standing near the table.

At that point, he said, another man—later identified as Dalton—entered the shop with a gun and announced, Just don’t do anything and nobody will get hurt. This is a stickup.

Frazier said he shouted, Look out, boys, he’s got a gun!

A burst of gunfire followed, the Associated Press reported. Some estimated as many as a dozen shots were fired.

One of the bullets hit Frazier, forty, in the torso, passing through his liver and right lung. He would die of his wounds about fifty hours later in Ball Memorial Hospital.

A poker player, Dewey Wills, described as a fifty-four-year-old factory worker, was shot several times in the abdomen. He staggered to the shop’s front door, where he fell dead.

Another participant in the card game, Theodore Rains, forty-three—a Muncie restaurant owner and father of five daughters—was shot in the heart. His body was found under the poker table.

Three other cigar store patrons suffered less severe wounds. In an era before medical privacy laws, photographs of the victims in their hospital beds—even the dying Frazier—were published in the city’s newspapers.

And Muncie police soon found yet another victim of the shootout.

Alleged bandit Gratzer—believed to have been shot in the stomach, accidentally, by Dalton—was found in Dalton’s Buick sedan near Heekin Park, at Grant Street and Memorial Drive.

Dalton, however, was nowhere to be found.

Taken to the hospital, Gratzer was rushed into surgery and then was interviewed by the Muncie Police Department’s lead detective, Merv Collins. (Also that morning, Dalton’s wife, Anna Mae, gave birth to their son in a Bedford hospital.)

While Gratzer later denied making most of the statements attributed to him by Collins, he purportedly said that Dalton had fatally shot Wills and Rains while he shot Frazier by accident during a struggle.

Newspaper coverage included photos taken at the shooting scene, some showing blood on the floor of the cigar store and a bullet hole in a wall, only inches from a framed photograph of Indiana governor Henry Schricker.

(Signs on the wall prohibited gamblers from drinking at the card tables and from asking to borrow money. Another read, All cards must be cut.)

In the wake of the shootings, Pastor Roberts of the Muncie Ministerial Association told the International News Service that he would urge Governor Schricker to station state troopers in Muncie until the city’s open gambling could be brought under control.

Reached by the Evening Press via long-distance telephone, the governor said he would help local authorities in all ways possible, but he did not commit to putting Muncie under the control of state police.

Mayor Lester Holloway expressed frustration over allegations of corruption aimed at Muncie in the wake of the New Deal Cigar Store slayings. Courtesy of Muncie Newspapers, Inc.

I want to put down murder and catch murderers as much as anyone else, the governor said.

The next week saw a grand jury investigation of the shootings begin.

The ministerial association sent the grand jurors a message—signed by local pastors Russell Hiatt and Robert Morris—urging the panel to use your power to compel enforcement of the laws against gambling and other forms of vice.

Muncie, the pastors wrote, was notorious as a haven for gamblers, prostitutes and criminals.

The FBI reports that Muncie has one of the highest crime rates in the nation, they added. Medical reports show that Muncie ranks high in the prevalence of venereal diseases.

Mayor Lester Holloway bristled at the growing criticism of law enforcement and of widespread gambling in his city.

How are you going to stop that? he asked. You can’t change people. You can’t just appoint a guardian over them to go along with them to keep them from doing it.

The Democratic mayor said he believed he and the city were being unfairly condemned, saying the shootings could have taken place in Anderson, or any other community in Indiana, or Ohio.

I don’t care what happens in Muncie, you stub your toe and you don’t like me, you will put the blame on me for it, Holloway said. I guess that’s part of the job.

The mayor said he didn’t intend to discuss the case further.

I’m not going to be a party to keeping that kind of publicity going, he said.

Police chief Harry Nelson said the blame for the slayings rested solely with Gratzer and Dalton, a pair of trigger-happy punks.

Delaware County sheriff W. Pete Anthony, meanwhile, said the county council was not giving him enough resources to combat gambling.

I most certainly think the members of the county council do not want the law enforced, he said. If they did, they’d give me more help.

Anthony added that if council members want the law enforced and gambling closed up…they’ll give me a vice squad of three men.

On October 18, the grand jury indicted Gratzer, recovering from his bullet wound, and Dalton, still at large, on first-degree murder charges. The panel also issued a statement finding law enforcement lax in Delaware County.

Thirteen days after the shootings, Don Dalton was captured in San Antonio, Texas.

A reporter there described Dalton as a self-styled gambler who outfitted himself like a cowboy when he hit Texas.

The papers said it was a holdup, but it wasn’t that way at all, Dalton said of the events in Muncie. It was self-defense.

He maintained he had been playing poker at the New Deal that night, and winning, before he was angrily accused of cheating.

Dalton said he had been shot in the left hand while trying to gather his winnings. Then someone turned the lights out in the cigar store, prompting several of the card players—including Dalton—to produce guns and fire into the darkness, he said.

There were about thirty men grabbing at me, Dalton claimed.

Dalton would give somewhat different accounts of the night in question when he and Gratzer’s Delaware Circuit Court trial began in late February 1950.

Donald Dalton testifies at his 1950 trial on three murder charges, stemming from a 1949 shootout at Muncie’s New Deal Cigar Store. Courtesy of the Muncie Star.

Attorney Ed Lewis of Indianapolis, defending Dalton, proved accurate in a prediction made in his opening remarks to jurors.